STL Time Machine Report #49 - Friday 23 July 1999 (1999-07-23) It's official, I will be on Y2K guard duty for 9-9-99. There's a large checklist for me to work through, gotta watch for unusual events, job crashes, try to boost my Windows Minesweeper scores. July 13th they tested the generators for building 2. We do that a couple of times a year. Building 1 has four locomotive-sized generators because that's where the mainframes are housed. I don't know if we're stockpiling more diesel fuel than normal. On July 18th we added another gigabyte of memory to the primary mainframe. Both the primary and secondary now have three gigabytes of memory each. Vacations will now be allowed in December with manager approval, except for the rollover period. No problems have shown up with our July 5th trigger date, but we'll have to check on January 1st to make sure old records are purging correctly. It's been tested many times, so it should work fine. TSO/ISPF/SDSF CONVERSION This month I've been going through the painful process of learning a new editor. We used to use a CICS-hosted ISPF lookalike, but they decided to dump it for TSO/ISPF/SDSF. One explanation for the change was to maintain Y2K readiness. That's funny, we used the old editor in the Time Machine and never had a problem with it. Now that SDSF seems to be bundled with OS/390 I'm sure the extra licensing cost for a second editor was a big consideration. It's also a lot easier to find contractors who know TSO/ISPF. Even though these editors are similar, they're different enough that my favorite keystroke shortcuts don't work, and it's easy to get frustrated, especially when you're in a hurry and you're not familiar with your tools. NO REST FOR THE WICKED Sunday afternoon I was driving to the movies when I got beeped. I was two miles from the office so I drove in rather than phoning home. When I get there, I still have to call the data center, and they invited me to enter the holy-of-holies. Just hit the buzzer, when we see you on the video monitor we'll open the mantrap door. I hadn't been inside it for several months, and they'd done some remodeling. After signing my name in blood in the logbook, they sat me down at the L-shaped console, 24 CRT's in two banks, like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Behind me another bank of 12 consoles, over them are three clocks, labeled St. Louis, Sydney, and Tokyo. On the wall a locked glass case with marquee letters. Not suite names or morale-boosting slogans, but IPL addresses and hexadecimal IPL parms. Four operators were eating lunch at their keyboards, because there were several production problems and they couldn't leave to put on the nosebag. I did a little CICS diagnosis at the console, looked up some VTAM netnames for them. Kevin took me around the back to show me a problem. We walked past the five tape SILO's, 40 tape drives and no tape apes in sight, past the twin Amdahls with ten 80-MIP engines, past the three pressurized halon canisters the size of 55-gallon drums, to the network nodes. Three of my twelve WAN routers were streaming error messages on their consoles. Yup, that looks like the problem right there. They had to call Network (which owns them) to have them re-booted. I made it to the movie just as the previews were starting. COBOL CONVERSION This issue has come back. The operations department wants us to recompile all COBOL II programs under COBOL for MVS and VM before COBOL II drops off support on March 31, 2001. They're worried that something will stop working if we don't. Originally they wanted this before November. I think this is kind of silly because IBM will support any COBOL program that is running with LE/MVS runtime libraries. We just converted all the OS/VS COBOL to COBOL II, and OS/VS COBOL had been off support for years. Sometime this fall, or Q1-2000, we will stop using the COBOL II compiler, and all future compiles will be with COBOL/MVS. I don't think we will recompile programs that have no business logic changes. Besides, then we would have to recompile them again when we get COBOL for OS/390 and VM. ST. LOUIS READINESS The other day I spent 30 minutes surfing for Y2K statements from local businesses, including three of the largest banks in the metropolitan area. They all SAY they're ready: For both NationsBank and Bank of America http://www.bankofamerica.com/y2k/ Mercantile Bank (they have their own Time Machine, but they were bought out by a Minnesota bank) http://www.mercantile.com/year2000/ Commerce Bank http://www.commercebank.com/info/pressreleases/current/pr07011999y2k.html Laclede Gas - done by July, 1999 http://www.lacledegas.com/frames13.htm AmerenUE - Electricity http://www.ameren.com/ameren2/index.htm St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District (do they have to provide our drinking water, too?) http://www.msd.st-louis.mo.us/Y2K.html SBC - Southwestern Bell - Y2K (local phones) http://www.sbc.com/year2000/ AT&T's Year 2000 Page http://www.att.com/year2000/ SIGNS, OMENS, PORTENTS Meanwhile, back in comp.software.year-2000, the debate rages over the constitution, the bible, the FAA, and Gold. Even Frank Ney's Credit Union is ready, due to his heroic efforts. Cory Hamasaki gets a call from a Fortune 500 company wanting to know if 2000 is a leap year. The flame wars continue, and the GPS rollover date is just four weeks away. Will we see any really big catastrophic failures on 1999-08-21? My guess is, probably not. Pam Hystad hasn't posted the URL for her unofficial, smallish comp.software.year-2000 FAQ in a while: http://www.computerpro.com/~phystad/csy2kfaq.html ANOTHER PHM STORY My buddy at the retailing organization has another tale of woe. No annual bonuses this year, because the money was all spent on their Y2K project, which is over budget. The real truth is that the money budgeted for Y2K was actually spent on the PHM's Web and LAN project, not Y2k. The mainframe geeks did their Y2k fixes out of their dwindling production support budget. As of 1999-07-23, my countdown now reads: 29 days until 1999-08-21 (GPS Rollover) 48 days until 1999-09-09 (Another date) 162 days until 2000-01-01 (Rollover) Previous Year 2000 Time Machine Reports are available at: http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/tmr.htm STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I am NOT an official corporate spokesperson. My opinions should not be held against my benevolent employer. -- Arnold Trembley http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/ "Y2K? Because Centuries Happen!"